Westcoast's Shivam Gupta started deep underwater diving at the age of 13

When you deep dive and four of your five senses stop working, you see underwater marine life from a whole different perspective — unmatched in the whole world. This feeling changed Shivam Gupta's life, he says.

The 23-year-old director of frozen food company, Westcoast, is an adventure junkie who enjoys various sports such as sky diving and polo, but nothing comes close to deep underwater diving. "I started at the young age of 13. Now, I go diving at least once a year," he says.

Gupta, who travels to Europe often, says he dives a lot in the Mediterranean and gets excited at any opportunity to dive, "just like a five-year old when he gets a candy." He adds that the fascination for holding breath underwater — like he did in the swimming pool — was there in him even as a kid. Now, he is a certified diver and has dived at all major spots in the world such as Indonesia, Maldives, Portugal and England.



(In photo: Shivam Gupta on an underwater dive trip at the Galapagos Islands.)


Last year, when Gupta went to Galapagos Islands at Ecuador, he and his fellow divers met disaster face-to-face when their yacht sank and they were stranded for almost 24 hours in the middle of the ocean on a lifeboat. "It was scary as hell," he says. "It was our fifth night on the yacht and it sank when we hit a rock. We were days away from land and this was at 2 am," recalls Gupta. Later, the group's SOS signals were noticed and they were rescued.

Yet, the beauty of the underwater marine life always pulls Gupta back to the adventure. "You will never see marine life like this unless you are actually in the middle of it," he says.